Serverless has transformed the application build and run aspects of delivering IT solutions by removing the need to provision and manage infrastructure.
AWS Lambda is one of the most prominent leaders in the serverless market with the biggest share and one of the most popular serverless options in the AWS ecosystem. It has broad and mature tooling, including a vast range of available integrations, application development frameworks and excellent observability support.
What you should know
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for almost any type of application or service without provisioning or managing servers. AWS Lambda can be triggered from over 200 AWS services and software as a service (SaaS) applications, and you only pay for exactly the usage consumed.
Benefits
AWS Lambda always operates on highly available, fault tolerant infrastructure using multiple ‘availability zones’. This allows you to seamlessly deploy code and provision all the administration, maintenance and patches in the infrastructure. Other benefits include out-of-the-box scalability with millisecond-based metering for charging and being able to pay only for throughput or run duration instead of the reserved server unit. All of this allows you to focus on building innovation instead of managing infrastructure.
Integration with AWS services
AWS Lambda is an ideal candidate not only for whole solutions like building SaaS in an event-driven or API-based manner, but also through many out-of-the-box integrations working in poll or event-driven ways to allow you to integrate and automate different parts of distributed applications. This allows you to focus on business specific transformations instead of writing the integration code for transferring data.
Use cases
AWS Lambda is the ideal candidate for building whole solutions exposed as API using modern and highly productive architectures like event-driven data focused applications without the need to provision and maintain underlying infrastructure with pay-per-use aspect. Another area where AWS Lambda shows its potential is in handling integration between systems where its capability of providing microservice, function-based approach without the need to provision underlying software shows a lot of benefits.
